Christopher Bonanos at The New York Times:
In the memorials to Steven P. Jobs this week, Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered his hero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.
When customers save an article with Instapaper, get a book in iBooks, or download a podcast with Instacast, they expect it to be there next time they launch the app. Even though it’s technically redownloadable, customers see that as their data — they put it there, and it’s theirs to remove if and when they see fit.
Read his post to see why iOS 5 is causing issues with apps like Instapaper.
This is what the future is like — a continuous experience across devices. A great addition to one of my favorite iOS apps.
Apple has published a support article outlining correct steps for using multiple AppleIDs on a single device. This is a life-saver for someone like me — I’ve got iCloud account for Mail, Contacts, etc., and another AppleID for iTunes purchases.
Well, iCloud is here, and as it goes with such things, there seem to be a few issues.
Mine involves Mail on the Mac. I upgraded my MobileMe account, but when I go to set it up on 10.7.2, it hangs here:
If I open Mail’s settings, this is set as my incoming server for the account:
Reviewing the iPhone 4S is in many ways a lot like reviewing the original iPhone 4, except that it’s not. The device, which was just announced at a special event on Apple’s campus, is very much the same phone the company released in June of 2010 — but it’s also something completely new.
[…]
In reality, however, the hardware is only half the story. Maybe not even half. The introduction of the iPhone 4S marks the introduction of iOS 5 as well. The new operating system is loaded with big improvements, from notifications to how your device connects to your computer. Packed with major features like iCloud integration and an innovative, voice-activated “intelligent assistant” named Siri, it’s not unfair to consider this one of the most meaningful updates to iOS we’ve ever seen.
In a sense, Siri is like a second interface to iOS. The first interface is the app interface. Launch, tap, drag, slide. The Siri interface is a different world. As stated above, this new interface is in many ways the opposite of the regular one — open-ended and implicit instead of narrowly defined and explicit. I don’t mean to imply that Siri doesn’t fit in or feel right at home — it does. But Siri is indicative of an AI-focused ambition that Apple hasn’t shown since before Steve Jobs returned to the company. Prior to Siri, iOS struck me being designed to make it easy for us to do things. Siri is designed to do things for us.
It’s free in the App Store.